Music breaking barriers

Cybergrindr – Fully Automated Psychic Violence

Cybergrindr is a probably-solo project from British Columbia. It is one of the few bands whose name actually reflects the genre they play… and they do it very right! Cybergrindr’s cybergrind is far from mundane. They see the opportunities the genre brings them, and they take them. For example, they profit from the obviously-programmed drums to go beyond what would be realistic: on ‘The Overseer Has Come Online’, they use drum hits – seemingly kick drums – at superhuman speeds to create what we interpret as musical notes, with pitch and length. And even though it’s the only place where I’ve heard this particular example on the album, the rest of it is outrageously at ease with its synthetic, mechanical, inhuman nature. So much so that the album actually delivers a science-fiction story based on computer networks, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. This is unsurprisingly reminiscent of Amogh Symphony’s The Quantum Hack Code, which could, by just a little stretch of the imagination, be called cybergrind too. The twenty-one track, thirty-minute album establishes itself as a staple of the genre and an example to follow. Hopefully, upcoming cybergrind releases will be aware of the genre’s limitations and the opportunities they offer, so that extreme music can be taken beyond what is achievable by the human mind and body as an uncanny analogy to transhumanism.